Wells Fargo offers up to $20 credits for Apple Pay users, says business Visa support coming next month.

As others have in promotion of Apple Pay service, Wells Fargo is offering customers up to $20 credits on their bill just for trying out the new NFC-based payments service. Readers sent in screenshots of an email (pictured above) that Wells Fargo has sent out to customers informing them of the credits in a promotion that will last until November 30. The company also confirmed that Apple Pay support for its business Visa cards is arriving next month…

Just check out in a merchant app or look for the Near Field Communication (NFC) symbol at checkout registers in stores and use your iPhone 6 Touch ID™ to authorize payment quickly and securely… Use your iPhone 6 to make an Apple Pay purchase with your Wells Fargo Credit Card by November 30, 2014, and you’ll earn a $20 statement credit.

The $20 credits are for credit card users, but the company is also offering a $10 credit for Apple Pay users with a debit or prepaid card.

Others are offering similar promotions to celebrate the launch of Apple Pay. Earlier this month we reported that Whole Foods stores were rewarding customers with a $5 gift card for trying the new service.

Wells Fargo customers that use the Apple Pay for the promotion expires on November 30th will get a $20 credit on their next credit card statement. Of course the deal, unlike those offered by retailers, is limited to customers with a credit card issued by Wells Fargo:

Apple Pay will work with most of our consumer and small business cards including Wells Fargo Visa® Credit, Debit, and Prepaid Cards; Wells Fargo MasterCard®Credit Cards; and with our new Wells Fargo Propel American Express® Credit Cards. Business MasterCard® Credit Cards are not eligible.

Wells Fargo also revealed that support for its business Visa cards are arriving next month, something that many banks have yet to roll out support for. We have a full list of supported card types through current Apple Pay banking partners here.

Wallpapers of the week: the mysterious iPad Air 2 wallpapers.

Over the past couple weeks, many folks tracked me down on Twitter hoping I was able to find the images used to market and advertise the new iPad Air 2. Originally on the iPad Air 2 web page, the included images were used as Lock screen splash images. Many people were excited about the new walls, but unfortunately, they did not ship with either iOS 8.1, iPad Air 2, or iPad mini 3.

The Lock screen images were originally on the website with different iPads, but seem to now be pulled down. If searching in the right place, you can still find the image pictured above. However, a blue-green variant is now seemingly removed. In an effort to support those folks looking for these images, we made them our Wallpapers of the Week.

Wallpapers

The images below were difficult to find. Both @Stijn_D3SIGN and @JasonZigrino were helping to run down the wallpapers with high quality resolutions for iOS devices. Consequently, this post is both a highlight of Jason Zigrino’s handy work and a call for more quality resolutions. According to Zigrino, he extracted them from the Apple site and they were not flat. Consequently, he performed a perspective crop and then he cleaned up the images below for irregularities and noise.

Below, the wallpapers are currently only for iPhone 6 and smaller screens. Certainly, you can use them on larger screens, like iPad mini, but expect some minor distortion.

Download iPhone 6: Left; Right

Wallpaper hunting

We are still hunting down any other possible resolutions. Because Apple did not ship them with the devices or iOS update, there may not be a way to find images large enough to support the retina screens on the iPhone 6 Plus, iPad mini, or iPad Air. If this is the case, count me in the long list of disappointed wallpaper lovers.

Today in the App Store — the best free apps, new apps and app updates.

Here are some of the best free apps, app updates and new apps that have landed in the App Store recently. All app prices are USD and subject to change. Some deals may expire quickly, so grab them while you can.

Apps Now Free

Bike Baron [iOS Universal; Now free, down from $0.99] Bike Baron is the Ultimate Bike Game for iPhone and iPad!

Great Big War Game [iOS Universal; Now free, down from $2.99] Taking military “advice” from the ridiculous generalissimo, can you battle your way through this truly massive, content-packed military campaign? Plan your missions, deploy your “forces”, try not to fall off the sofa laughing!

Boom Brigade [iOS Universal; Now free, down from $1.99] Defend, draw lines and shoot aliens! Boom Brigade is an explosive hybrid of tower defence, line drawing, real time strategy and top down shooter.

Quicklytics – Google Analytics [iOS Universal; Free] quicklytics-google-analytics.

aTimeLogger 2 [iOS Universal; Now free, down from $2.99] Application for tracking your everyday activities.

SAMURAI SANTARO – Dark Onmyoji [iOS Universal; Now free, down from $4.99] The traditional Japanese mounted archery “Yabusame” has been reborn as a major action game!

Power of Logic [OS X; Now free, down from $1.99] Power of Logic is a rebirth of the classic board game with endless variations.

New and Notable Apps

Toca Boo [iOS Universal; $2.99] BOO! Did I scare you!? My name is Bonnie and my family loves to spook!

Intuon [iOS Universal; $0.99] Join the battle with your intuition in a new hardcore game Intuon!

Mecanic [iOS Universal; $1.99] With ‘MECANIC’ kids will have fun assembling several different pieces. Straight lines, elbows, rectangles, triangles.

Pixelmator [iPad; $4.99] Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images.

Inbox by Gmail – the inbox that works for you [iPhone; Free] Inbox, built by the Gmail team, keeps things organized and helps you get back to what matters.

OneShot [OS X; $1.99] OneShot allows you to upload your screenshots, files or folders to ANY Dropbox folder with ease.

Tumblr [OS X; Free] What does the official Tumblr app do? Two things. Two fascinating things.

Updates you don’t want to miss

Fantastical 2 for iPad – Calendar and Reminders [iPad; $7.99] The award-winning, best-selling calendar app has been redesigned and reimagined for your iPad with iOS 8. With the convenient Fantastical Dashboard, you’ll add, view, and interact with your events and reminders with ease.

• View your calendar and event list in Notification Center with Fantastical’s Today widget
• Quickly create events or reminders from selected text in extension-enabled apps with Fantastical’s app extension
• Interactive notifications let you quickly snooze an alert or complete a reminder
• Fantastical 2 now requires iOS 8
• Various fixes and improvements

Fantastical 2 for iPhone – Calendar and Reminders [iPhone; $2.99] The award-winning, best-selling calendar app has been redesigned and reimagined for iOS 8. With the convenient Fantastical Dashboard, you’ll add, view, and interact with your events and reminders with ease.

• View your calendar and event list in Notification Center with Fantastical’s Today widget
• Quickly create events or reminders from selected text in extension-enabled apps with Fantastical’s app extension
• Interactive notifications let you quickly snooze an alert or complete a reminder
• Fantastical 2 now requires iOS 8
• Various fixes and improvements

Converter [OS X; $1.99] Converter is a unit converter that converts between 16 different categories and hundreds of units. Version 1.1 brings the following changes:

• Added Octal conversion to Decimal And Hexadecimal Converter
• Added Logs to show previous conversions (logs can be modified in Preferences)
• Added 18 Physics Formulas and Calculations
• Fixed a bug Causing Constants to not work properly with Converter and Calculator
• Fixed a bug with Area Conversions
• New icon
• More minor bug fixes

Worms™ 3 [OS X; $4.99] Worms™ 3 has been developed for OSX and allows Mac gamers to challenge friends on iOS devices. Version 1.14 brings the following changes:

• Halloween has arrived!
• Scare your opponents to death with terrifying hats!
• Throw pumpkins at your enemies!
• Cower as your allies are buried under chilling new graves!
• Tremble at the spine-tingling new icon and menus!

DWISS introduces first Apple Watch accessories in new crowdfunding campaign.

We may not even have a solid release date for the Apple Watch yet, but that’s not stopping the designers at DWiSS from launching a crowdfunding campaign for a new line of wearable accessories. The line includes several colorful watch covers and bands that can be used to customize your device beyond Apple’s selection of bands and faces.

The covers will wrap around the watch itself, while the bands will fit into place just like any of Apple’s own bands. There will also be a lineup of custom software watch faces available.

The DWISS team is seeking $30,000 in funding by December 1st. All backers will get access to at least one of the five custom watch faces. For $19 you’ll get a cover in your choice of color, and contributions of $49-$79 will get you one of the watch bands. You can back the campaign at Indiegogo.

This lamp lets you combine all your iOS gadgets into one huge touchscreen.

Collaboration across multiple devices could get a whole lot more interesting if MIT’s newest device hack catches on. It’s a combination of software and hardware called HuddleLamp, and it lets you turn all your touchscreen gadgets into a single workspace where users can literally toss items back and forth, and manipulate the size of photos and documents to fit across all of them. In short, it turns all your touchscreens into into one massive desktop.

HuddleLamp works by combining software installed on each device with a 3D camera hidden inside a lamp that looks down on the all the devices. With the camera in place, the software can make sense of where all the devices are in relation to each other and alter each of the displays accordingly. Smaller items can be moved — or even thrown — from one device’s display to another, while larger objects fill multiple screens and can be moved and resized at will.

HuddleLamp is an open source project and a commercial product is not currently planned. The tracking software will be publicly released by the developers on November 16, so if you’re interested in creating your own super collaboration desk, you can dive into the resources available on the HuddleLamp website.

How to use OS X Yosemite to send texts from your Mac.

In the past, using the Messages app on a Mac could be an irritating experience. And what if a friend dared to send a green-bubble text from an Android phone? When texting from your Mac, messaging those friends wasn’t possible until now.

In today’s Cult of Mac video, find out how to enable Text Message Forwarding between your iPhone and Mac. With iOS 8.1 and Yosemite installed, enjoying this seamless feature is just a few short taps and clicks away. Find out how to do it all in this speedy tutorial.

 

Here’s how to stream every Simpsons ever on your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV.

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to have every episode of The Simpsons ever streamable on your iPhone or iPad, there is no longer any reason to, as a certain yellow-skinned tyke might say, “have a cow.”

You can now stream the complete Simpsons archive over an iOS app, no matter where you are. But there’s a catch.

All 552 episodes of The Simpsons is now available online through the Simpsons World FX portal. Not only can you browse every episode ever right in a web browser, or all the clips that feature Nelson saying, “Ha ha!” You’ll also be able to create your own playlists of episodes or scenes — “Treehouse of Horror” playlists for Christmas, anyone?

After teasing Simpsons World for a while, FX has now activated the official Simpsons World portal through the FX Networks app. It’s also available on the web, and should soon be available through Apple TV.

Unfortunately, there’s a drawback. If you want to watch The Simpsons online, you’ll already need to be a subscriber of a participating cable company. Cable unbundling just can’t come soon enough, can it?

You can download the official FXNow app — and, by extension, Simpsons World — here.

Adjust your iPhone’s brightness from the home button with this iOS 8.1 trick.

iOS 7 made it easier than ever for iPhone users to toggle the brightness on devices through Command Center, but if you’re too lazy to go through a few flicks and swipes to adjust your screen’s brightness, we’ve discovered a way to dim your display by simply pressing your home button three times.

To activate the setting you have to do some digging through the Accessibility settings in iOS 8.1, but once you’ve set it up you’ll never go back to Control Center to adjust your brightness.

Here’s how to do it:

1 – Go to Settings >> General >> Accessibility >> Zoom >> Enable Zoom
2 – Tap your screen three times with three fingers to pull up menu
3 – Tap Choose Filter then select Low Light
4 – Go to Settings >> General >> Accessibility >> Accessibility Shortcut >> Set to “Zoom”
5 – Press home button three times to toggle brightness.

If you get lost just follow the GIF walkthrough below:

This app will hack Continuity to work on your older Mac.

Continuity is one of the best features of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, allowing your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to all operate more seamlessly together than ever before. But there’s a problem: Continuity requires Bluetooth 4.0 LE to work, and many older Macs don’t have it.

But don’t despair. A new tool has been released makes it possible to easily hacktivate Continuity, even if Apple doesn’t want you to.

Called the Yosemite Continuity Activation Tool, the app can not only diagnose what you need to change on your Mac to enable Handoff, Instant hotspot, and AirDrop on your older Mac, but will make it easy for you to get Continuity working too.

Here’s the deal. Although Continuity absolutely depends upon Bluetooth 4.0 LE to work, there are many third-party cards which, theoretically, you can plug into your Mac. By default, Apple doesn’t recognize these third-party solutions to enable Continuity… unless you use this tool.

Using Yosemite Continuity Activation Tool, you can hack Continuity into the following Macs: any MacBook Air from 2008 on, any Mac mini from 2009 on, any iMac from 2008 on, and any MacBook Pro from mid 2009 on.

There’s one big “but” though: you need to replace your Mac’s wireless and Bluetooth card to get Continuity to work on these older Macs. A USB dongle won’t cut it: you need to perform surgery. But if you don’t mind cutting your Mac open and installing a new card, Yosemite Continuity Activation Tool will take care of the rest.

You can download the app here.

Apple iPad mini 3 unboxing and first impressions Video.

Along with Apple’s iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 also hit store shelves during a silent weekday release. If you don’t currently own an iPad mini, it’s probably a better time than ever to pick one up, but I wouldn’t really recommend getting Apple’s latest and greatest. Let me tell you why…

Inside of the iPad mini 3, you’ll find a dual-core Apple A7 chip clocked at 1.3GHz, 1GB of RAM, a quad-core PowerVR G6430 GPU, and a 6,470 mAh battery. The iPad mini’s Retina display is 7.9-inches with a resolution of 1,536 x 2,048 (324 ppi). On the back side you’ll find a 5-megapixel shooter, while the front side is home to the 1.2-megapixel FaceTime camera. If any of these specifications sound familiar, it’s because they were also inside of the iPad mini 2.

Apple’s iPad mini 3 is nearly identical to its predecessor. In fact, the only difference between the iPad mini 2 and 3 is the addition of Touch ID and a gold color option. Aside from that, you won’t find any new and exciting hardware. Is this a disappointment? If the iPad lover within you needs to have a gold mini with Touch ID, that’s totally fine, but in my opinion you’re better off purchasing the iPad mini 2 as it’s available for $100 less.

Check out our iPad mini 3 unboxing and first impressions video below:

Keep in mind, the base iPad mini models only come in 16GB configurations. If you’re planning on loading it up with apps and other media, you might want to opt for a 64GB mini 3 at $499 or get a 32GB iPad mini 2 for $349. Apple’s iPad mini 2 is now the only place you’ll find a 32GB configuration for the mini lineup and it might be the best deal if you don’t care about Touch ID.

I’m not sure that the iPad mini 3is  worth upgrading to over the second generation. Here’s my advice: If you’re in the market for a new Apple tablet, save $100 and buy a 16GB iPad mini 2 for $299 or get the 32GB model for $50 more.